By his own account, comedian Wyatt Gray doesn't just choose his words carefully — he chooses them obsessively. “I love to put extra effort into every word I say,” he tells the audience in his Taboo Tales video, “Wyatt and the Good Vibrations.”

His attention to language and speech is not by whim, though, as he explains in the video: It's the direct result of being a stutterer. And stuttering, as he describes, came to him as the result of trauma — the loss of his father, murdered when Gray was still a toddler.

It was that loss, too, that brought his family from Los Angeles to Ojai, where Gray spent his formative years. Ojai is also where he made the transition from a taciturn stutterer to a confident master of elocution. Inspired in part by the oratorical skills of actors he heard in movies — Gregory Peck, for example — Gray made up his mind to overcome any inclination to stutter. “I got to where I am today by dogged practice and the determined belief I had a voice and something to say.”